


Ten Years

by PlayingTheGameOfThrones



Category: Star Wars, The Force Awakens - Fandom
Genre: Background Reylo, Gen, mother and son angst, not TLJ compliant
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-31
Updated: 2017-09-04
Packaged: 2018-12-22 09:40:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11964747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlayingTheGameOfThrones/pseuds/PlayingTheGameOfThrones
Summary: Kylo Ren has turned himself in to the Resistance.





	1. Chapter 1

Leia Organa's son is on the other side of the glass. He can't see her as he sits across from the two-way mirror, fingers drumming listlessly on the table in front of him as he awaits interrogation.

Leia Organa hasn't seen her son in ten years.

He's not the scared boy he still had been at 23, the sullen and withdrawn youth she had videocommed with as he trained with his uncle. She can still remember the way his voice had broken as he said "What if I don't want to be a Jedi?" before abruptly ending what would be their last conversation.

Kylo Ren hasn't seen his mother in ten years. He has felt her; can feel her now, as a matter of fact, standing on the other side of the two-way mirror across from where he sits.

 _Kylo Ren has no mother,_ he reminds himself. _General Organa had a son named...his name doesn't matter. I killed him._

 _Does he know I'm here?_ Leia tries to reach out to her son, like the way she had to Luke so long ago. But her son's mind – Kylo Ren's mind – is shut off from her. And Leia's never been a Jedi.

 _What if I don't want to be a Jedi?_ Those words, more than any others her son had ever said to her, had nagged at her for years, and not just because they were the last words he ever spoke to her. Leia had never wanted to be a Jedi, either. Had rejected it. _Anakin Skywalker was a Jedi once._ She had never been able to forgive her birth father, not in the way Luke had, and had never forgiven the Jedi for the monster they had let fester and grow in their ranks until it destroyed them. _Monsters aren't born, they're made,_ Luke had told her once. If Darth Vader was made, the Jedi had a hand in making him.

_Why did I ever send him away?_

Kylo Ren can feel the general's distress, even if he can't see it flicker across her face. He's always known how to sense his mother and her emotions when he wanted to – and sometimes, when he was younger, before he killed Ben Solo, even when he _didn't_ want to. Now he can shut her out when he wants. But right now something inside him feels compelled to search her feelings. He knows what he'll feel: disappointment, grief, and hatred for the monster that destroyed her son so many years ago.

But – no. He doesn't feel any of that. He senses grief, of course, and deep sadness. But disappointment, hatred, disgust for the creature on the other side of the glass from her...there is none of that.

And then he feels something the creature of Kylo Ren has never felt, something that was very familiar to Ben Solo.

He shakes his head. _Any love General Organa feels is for her son. It is of no concern to me._

"General Organa."

Leia grudgingly tears her eyes away from the man who had been her son to find Poe Dameron at her side. "Poe," she says by way of greeting.

Leia Organa has not cried in many years. Not since she lost Han. But she doesn't trust herself not to burst into tears like the girl who had watched her planet die right here in front of Dameron and Rey behind him.

_You are not that girl anymore. You must be strong for them._

"Rey is ready to conduct the interrogation."

Leia shifts her gaze to the young woman in the doorway, her dark hair loose and framing her face, dressed in the grey Jedi robes she's grown fond of wearing since she had completed her training, a lightsaber clipped to her belt.

"You don't have to do this, Rey." Leia has only heard mere whispers of what had happened between her son and the former scavenger during her training on Ahch-To. But she knows enough to be wary that Rey isn't as ready to interrogate her former lover for his crimes as she seems to be.

Rey gives the general a small smile and places a hand on her shoulder. "Interrogating prisoners of the Resistance is my job, General."

Leia nods. "Of course."

Rey pushes through the door into the interrogation room. Leia wishes she could look away. But she turns back to the glass, and she watches.

"Well," Kylo sneers, "how the tables have turned."

"I see you haven't lost your sense of humor." Rey takes the seat across the table from Kylo Ren. "That's good."

Kylo shuts his mind off from the General. He can feel her probing at the edges of his brain.

He came to turn himself in. Not to have his brain dissected by an old woman searching in vain for any remnants of her dead son.

Kylo Ren might be fractured beyond repair, but there is no reviving the dead.

"Are you ready to begin?" he hears Rey say.

Kylo closes his eyes, breathes deeply, focuses on opening his mind to the girl in front of him while keeping it shut to everyone else. It's easier than it should be; even after everything, the Force bond between Kylo and the Jedi could never quite be severed.

Rey reaches her hand out, eyes locked on Kylo's. "You killed the Supreme Leader," she chants, falling through his memories the way he had done to her so long ago in a much different interrogation chamber. "You took his place as head of the First Order." They watch as Kylo Ren stepped over the body of Snoke and took his throne, the Praetorian guards lying dead at his feet, their blood indistinguishable from the red of their uniforms. "You purged the highest ranks of command." Kylo's red lightsaber slashed down, cutting down General Hux and Captain Phasma and Dopheld Mitaka and countless, faceless, nameless others. "You killed your own father." Here Rey's voice breaks and she pushes past the memory. "You killed your uncle."

Kylo slams his mind shut. "That wasn't on my orders!" he snarls.

Rey takes a shaky breath and lowers her hand to the table. "Master Luke was killed by First Order forces." Her voice is eerily calm. Kylo senses if she isn't calm, she will kill him. He shouldn't be surprised. Whatever they once shared could never erase the damage they had both inflicted on each other. "He was killed under your leadership."

"Stop." Leia stands in the doorway, face unreadable.

Something deep inside Kylo Ren twists painfully. Kylo Ren hasn't seen Leia Organa since before Ben Solo died.

Rey rises to her feet. "General Organa, you can't be here. It's a conflict of interest for a relative to be in the interrogation room."

"Kylo Ren is a conflict of interest for everyone in the Resistance. Every single one of us has lost people to this man."

"General, this is my job, I have it under control. As his mother, you–"

"And you slept with him. We both have personal history here. I am the leader of the Resistance. I am taking over this interrogation. You are dismissed."

 


	2. Chapter 2

Leia takes the seat across from the man who had been her son and folds her hands on the table between them.

"General Organa."

"Be quiet," Leia snaps. "I am conducting this interrogation, not you."

Kylo Ren falls silent. Even after all this time, he knows better than to disobey his mother. His eyes flick up to hers, but they betray nothing. He's too afraid to lower the barrier between their minds. It's different with Rey; she knows his darkness, had even chosen it, in another life. General Organa has heard whispers of his darkness, but she has never seen it. She doesn't share the darkness he and Rey share.

_And you don't want your mother to hate you,_ whispers a voice deep inside Kylo that he thought he'd killed. _Your mother,_ he corrects the voice. _Ben Solo's mother. Kylo Ren has no mother._

"You killed my husband," Leia begins. Kylo can't look her in the eyes anymore. "Your own father. He held you right after you were born. He taught you to fly in the cockpit of the Falcon."

_He rejected me,_ Kylo wants to say. _When my powers began to manifest, he took other young pilots under his wing. He was afraid of me. And then he left both of us._ He doesn't say any of it, but he feels his mother's Force signature poking at the barrier, and he knows she can feel his thoughts whether he verbalizes them or not.

"Han knew nothing of the Force," Leia says in reply to Kylo's thoughts. "It frightened him when he saw it in me, and terrified him when he saw it in his own son."

_I was his son. He shouldn't have been afraid of his own son. Especially when the son can feel the fear and doesn't understand._

"So instead of trying to assuage his fear, you justified it by murdering him."

Kylo keeps his mind blank.

"Not only did you kill your father, you were the Supreme Leader of the First Order when it killed your uncle in cold blood. I suppose it's a miracle you didn't kill me too."

Kylo clenches his fist, but stays silent.

"Do you remember the girl who worked with me? Her name was Korr Sella. She was only a few years younger than you. Rey even reminds me of her, sometimes."

Kylo remembers Korrie. A small girl with dark skin and hair and a sweet smile who worked under General Organa in the senate just before he began training with Luke.

"You killed her too."

Kylo furrows his brows and tucks away his memories. "What?"

"She was on Hosnian Prime the day you destroyed it. That innocent girl and countless other innocents just like her, just like Rey, slaughtered by _you_."

_"No!"_

Kylo drops the barrier entirely, and lets the General in his memories.


	3. Chapter 3

_Kylo Ren stands on the bridge of the Finalizer, face hidden behind a mask long since destroyed. He watches, helpless, as four separate beams of light reach halfway across the galaxy. He shuts his eyes as if he could drown out the billions of voices crying out in fear and agony before falling silent._

"I didn't kill them. I tried to stop it. I tried to save them." Kylo's voice is smaller than it's been in years.

"Did you try to save me when the First Order bombed the Senate right before you turned?" Leia asks, nothing in her voice or face betraying any emotion she might be feeling. "Did you try to save the Resistance when your Starkiller targeted us on D'Qar?"

_Ben Solo, in his final days, holds a hastily written note in a trembling hand._ The Supreme Leader can never know _, he reminds himself._ He would never forgive me this deceit, this weakness. It will never happen again, _he assures himself._

Leia's facade is beginning to crack.

_Kylo Ren's hands shake as he scrawls the note he said he would never write. "The weapon will fire in two minutes." He folds the note up, hands it to his personal astromech, the one he programmed himself years ago to keep all his secrets safe from the Supreme Leader. The droid disappears around a corner to transmit the message. It's not enough. Kylo knows this. But something inside him stops him from doing more, the way it always does. Fear, anger, loyalty to the Supreme Leader keeps him on Starkiller. And the girl. He has to find her, too._

"You yourself knew it wasn't enough!" Leia has dropped her emotionless facade altogether now, Kylo notices. "Two moments of humanity does not, can not, make up for ten years of murder and deceit and cruelty! You killed your father, your fellow students, your uncle!"

Kylo's face twists up in a cruel grin. "Have you learned nothing, General Organa? All of this has been out of my control since the beginning."

Leia shakes her head as if to rid her brain of her son's voice, to convince herself that the man across from her is a cruel stranger who killed her son long ago. "How can that be true?" she asks, but her voice is quieter now.

_Ben Solo is 23 years old, and he's never heard the name Kylo Ren. He's training to be a Jedi, like his grandfather and uncle before him. He's a head taller than the other tallest pupil at his uncle Luke Skywalker's Jedi academy, his limbs long and gangly and clumsy. He's given up believing he'll "grow into them." He feels an anger simmering inside him most days, a darkness that whispers in his ear most nights, but he pushes them down so his uncle and fellow padawans will not see._

A tea rolls down Leia's cheek. Kylo feels tears springing to his own eyes and he blinks until they disappear. Now is not the time.

_Ben Solo has found a rare moment of peace alone, away from his uncle and the other padawans. He and Uncle Luke had been excavating an ancient Sith temple in the far reaches of the galaxy until recently, and the other students had bombarded the two of them with questions incessantly since their return. He's just about to open a book when Uncle Luke appears in the doorway of the room Ben shares with a handful of other students, all of who are currently elsewhere._

Kylo can feel Leia's grief at seeing her twin's face again. He almost ends the vision here. Let his mother – Ben Solo's mother – believe whatever she wants to believe about him, whatever makes it easier for her. He doesn't know why he cares anyway. He came here to give himself up, to take whatever punishment the Resistance sees fit to give him, to live out the rest of his days in exile or be executed, he doesn't care either way. The man who had been Ben Solo has lost everything. He hasn't come here to be reminded of how he lost it.

But somehow, something inside Kylo Ren – that bit of Ben Solo he was never able to destroy – keeps him going.

_"Ben, I need to speak with you. Now."_

_Ben Solo's first instinct is to scoff and complain about wanting his solitude, but something in his uncle's face stops him. "Uncle Luke? What is it?"_

_From behind Luke, Ben hears something that sounds like shattering glass. He wonders briefly if one of the younglings is merely throwing a tantrum._

_That's when he hears the unmistakable sounds of shouts, and lightsabers igniting._

_"Come with me._ Now _."_

 


End file.
